Celebrity Homes

Studio Vero

Downsizing is rarely easy. Re-arranging a lifetime’s treasured family possessions into a significantly smaller space is often demanding of emotions and tempers. Fortunately, for the owners of this period house in west London, they had as their mentors Romanos Brihi and his partner Venetia Rudebeck, co-owners of Notting Hill-based interior designers Studio Vero.

Brihi had designed their family home in north London and was involved with their deliberations from the moment the decision was taken to move. “We wanted to downsize, but we also

wanted to live in an easier, less formal way,” says the owner. “Because we’d never done it, we didn’t quite understand how to communicate that, but Studio Vero got exactly what we meant.”

As someone who started his professional career working with Finchatton, one of London’s leading developers, Brihi is accustomed to envisaging the possibilities in even the most unpromising space, but his clients’ requirements always come first. “The owners have a large family in London and love entertaining. I felt some of the properties they were looking at initially would just have been too small for their needs.”

Brihi found and recommended a neat double-fronted Victorian house in Kensington, pretty as a picture on the exterior, with scope for tailoring to requirements indoors. “It actually appeared bigger than it was, but it was only one room deep on each floor, and the lower-ground floor had low ceilings and a tricky layout,” says Brihi. These were faults that could be remedied by the addition of a rear extension, the rearrangement of walls and windows, and the excavation of 40cm of earth. The architectural revisions left four floors of light and spacious living, the ideal canvas to introduce a look with a strong American accent. “The owners wanted something fresh and elegant, simple but sophisticated. Florida meets Park Avenue.”

They also, however, needed to rehouse the highlights of a carefully accumulated collection of fine antique furniture and 19th- and 20th-century paintings, and this required a careful edit. “We helped them select the pieces they were going to bring with them and then worked the design round these,” says Brihi.

In order to ensure aesthetic coherence, the ground floor sitting and dining room were designed around lighter, more abstract works, the lower-ground floor kitchen and family room with earlier oil paintings in mind.

Then, of course, there were the books, an extensive library of striking leather-bound early editions. Brihi shares Anthony Powell’s perspective that Books do Furnish a Room – “no interior is really complete without them,” says Brihi – and here decided to treat them as a coherent collection of objets d’art, commissioning bespoke bookcases with overhead picture lights and backs lacquered in aqua gloss to highlight their warm and depth.

The colour palette throughout has been carefully modulated to reflect the use of each room, with a light and summery prospect in the master bedroom – “the owners want something very serene and calming” – and a warmer, more autumnal mood in the cosy open-plan family room opening out on to the garden on the lower-ground floor.

Space for entertaining is very much a leitfmotif of the born-again space, and the owner is delighted with the multi-faceted opportunities now offered. “I’ve hosted 80 for drinks on the terrace, had 36 people for Christmas lunch in the family room, and even given children’s parties for my grandchildren.”

In order to unify the whole, the bespoke has played a starring role. “I love supplying individual pieces that the owners’ friends won’t have,” says Brihi. “I don’t feel I’ve done my job properly if I just shop on the high street.”

Certainly, no one could accuse him of neglecting his responsibilities, and here every detail has been carefully considered, from the dining room chairs adorned with period-referenced hooks on the back, allowing them to be pulled back without marring the fabric, to the carpet on the fluid sweep of hall staircase edged with contrast stripes. “The treads were too narrow for a stair runner but this alludes to it.”

And, while the beautiful is always to the fore, the practical is kept firmly in view. “We really wanted to use a De Gournay silk wallpaper on the staircase, but with children and suitcases, we thought it would get scuffed and ruined, so we had our decorative painter create the look of silk panels – including the joins.”

“They finished the project incredibly quickly and we hardly had to go to a meeting,” says the owner. “It really was a very pleasant experience.”Not something that’s always said of downsizing.